


Five Words... Vila

by Sally M (sallymn)



Series: Five Words [13]
Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Angst, Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 19:18:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7374166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallymn/pseuds/Sally%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For a challenge I was given five words and had to write ficlets on each for Vila. The words were <em>space, water, wishes, land</em> and <em>crater... </em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Words... Vila

**Author's Note:**

> All character deaths are canon; this is Blakes 7, after all.

**Five Words... Vila**

_**Space**_

There were - according to Zen - one hundred and thirty three single occupant cabins on the Liberator (and sixteen 'troop dormitories', somewhere on the fifth deck). 

The one Vila took was large, light, airy and full of empty space. Not as much as Avon's or Jenna's (first on after Blake, they'd grabbed the best within a day) but more space than the whole flat in the Delta Dome back home that he'd shared as a child with his Mum, his uncle's family and an couple of Elderly Relatives no one paid much attention to. Much more space than the Juvenile Pod 17 that was his first experience of Corrective Prison Dome life and which he shared with fourteen others, all under the age of twelve, for a year and a half before convincing them he was 'corrected'. Even more space than the underDome subways - the Thieves' Tunnels - where he'd made a rough stall for himself among the outcasts and filled with his first 'other people's things' while he learned all he could from the older cons about his not-really-chosen career. Way more space than the abandoned and powerless flat in the outer rim of an aging Beta Dome where he hid out for a couple of years. 

And more light and empty space than any of the various cells he'd shared with other crooks and criminals on his way to a crowded and stale-aired cabin on a prison ship headed for Cygnus Alpha. 

Vila basked in it for... well, at least an Earth week, by his own reckoning. But if anyone wondered why - after that week of staring at long blank walls and empty floors, and waking to darkness unshadowed by clutter in the night - he shifted to the second smallest cabin and started filling it with odd bits and pieces he found in the Treasure Room, the Wardrobe Room, the Curio Room, the Utensil Room, the WeDon'tKnowWhatToCallThoseThings Rooms all over the ship - no one asked. 

It was his own, now not so empty space, after all. 

  

_**Water**_

You drink only water now. 

Because the thing is, you can't quite remember that last day on Gauda Prime. Were you drunk? Not quite, not... totalled. Not slozzled. Not hammered. Not boozed up enough to call it drunk. 

But you weren't that sober, either. From the time you reached Xenon you weren't always, or even usually, _that_ sober, not by choice. 

You drank a lot through the time on Xenon, to soften the cold misery of being there. With Avon, what was left of Avon (though you didn't know till too late just how little that was). With overbearing, sneering Tarrant, with callow, cruel but beautiful Dayna, with the riddle wrapped in a puzzle that was Soolin. 

You drank your way through Dorian's impressive cellars (Avon and the others didn't know that you'd shifted most of the good - and semi-good stuff - before they could take it off you, well at least Soolin might have wondered where it went, but she didn't have Dorian's keys till after. You didn't _need_ the keys.) And you had your share, in the fact of Tarrant's lectures and Dayna's sneers, of any that was bought/brought/found in Avon's disastrous forays to other worlds. And - if you'd needed, which you might have with a bit more time - you did have the makings of a still and were pretty sure at least two of the local plants would make a moonshine numbing enough to do. 

You didn't get that far. You and your little lifesaver flask were both topped up with some of Dorian's third-rate alien gin when Gauda Prime - happened - and they died, but you didn't. You don't quite know how - you weren't sober, and you were hurt - but you got away. 

You drank the rest of the alien gin while sitting in scrubby forest, alone and afraid and drunk and crying for them all. Gan. Jenna, Blake. Cally. Zen. Tarrant, Dayna... Soolin. Avon. 

Drunk, you found Orac and cried as you threw his key, and your lifesaver flask, away. 

  


You live quietly on what's left of Gauda Prime now, a backwater part of the crumbling Federation. You live alone, you steal what you need and you need very little. 

The Xenon gin was the last of your old life, and you drink only water now. 

  

_**Wishes**_

_"Your wish is our command..."_ Well yes, that's nice, innit? Here I am, the only member of the crew who hasn't been zapped by some sort of mind control thing, and the one who has to bring them out of it before one of them actually works out what I wish and does it - or tries to - and then when they _do_ come out of it, kills me because they did it. Or tried to. 

And I've got no idea how the mind control thing happened, let alone how to make it stop. 

I have to be strong and that's not something I'm good at, is it? I can wish all I like, when I'm dreaming on the flight deck, but I'm not mad enough to _really_ wish Jenna to do _that_. Well... not when she can't help herself, and not when I know what she'll do to _me_ when she finds out. If she finds out... and she will. With my luck, I _know_ she will. And then she'll kill me. 

(But would it be worth it? I have to keep telling myself no, don't I?) 

And Cally... let's just say there are things I'd wish for even more than _Jenna_ doing... what she'd kill me for. And there are worse things than Jenna killing me. 

I'm not all that sure that Cally - for all she says she can't read minds - can too pick up what I wish no matter how much I try not to say or even think about it. And what Cally would do when she came out and found out (and she would, whether she _can_ read minds, or even, given what it is, whether she can't) I really wish I wasn't thinking about. 

Gan... well, Gan is safe. What I wish, he can't do. At all. And I now wish I hadn't thought about him trying. 

Blake won't kill me, no, not even if I wished, and he did whatever I wished. But I can't. Given what mind control did to him before... I'm serious, I can't. I'd nearly wish myself _dead_ before I wished that. 

(Nearly.) 

As for wishing myself dead - Avon. There's Avon. I keep telling myself that once Avon came to himself and found out, I _definitely_ would wish myself dead, in a nice painless way of course, because what I sometimes wish Avon would do, and what Avon would do if he did it and then found out... would not be nice, not be painless and definitely not be worth it. 

(Except that it would, it so would). 

So my wish is for Orac to organise them all off the ship till I work out how to make the mind control thing stop, or the mind control thing wears off by itself, or me telling myself how not worth it it would be wears off. Or something rather more likely, like my wish being _Servalan's_ command might be... 

  

_**Land**_

"Tarrant, for gods sake wake up and land this ship or I'll have to and you _know_ what happened last time, when you insisted on teaching me how! 

"I'm panicking, okay? I might have the galaxy's most skilful and delicate hands, but this bucket of bolts and rust - and I don't _care_ that herculanium doesn't rust, I've seen the ballast tanks and if that's not rust I don't want to know what it is and where was I? - oh yeah, skilful and delicate hands, bucket of bolts, that planet's surface looks harder than Avon's heart on a bad day and I can't remember what you said to do when the engine's shot, at least I can't remember when I'm panicking and right now, while you won't wake up and take over, I'm panicking, okay? 

"All the more given it was _your_ skilful and delicate fumbling at the controls that made us lurch like a strangled warg in a bog and so it's _your_ fault you hit your head though I know you'll blame me because you always do, don't you? - at least you'll blame me if you wake up and we're both dead and in pieces across the ground down there... 

"And if what happens when I press this button marked EMERGENCY LANDING - DON'T TOUCH is as bad as it always is with me, and if we _are_ both dead and in pieces when you wake up? 

"I'm blaming you first." 

  

_**Crater**_

Where Scorpio crashed, there is now a small shallow crater littered with bits of hull, engine, trailing cables and twisted wire, ballast tanks... stardrive. A feebly glowing, totally wrecked stardrive. 

There is going to be a rather bigger crater soon, when that glow turned inwards. 

Slave - the robotic heart of the ship - is as dead as a machine could be, its mangled remains buried in what used to be the ugliest flight deck in three sectors. 

Vila sighs, and slides down the metal hull of the little flyer he'd stolen and is now leaning against. He lands with a thump on the ground, staring at Scorpio miserably. Nothing left there to salvage. 

"Look on the bright side, Vila," Soolin says softly. "We're alive." 

"Some of us," he mutters. 

"And the Federation - most of the galaxy - thinks we're dead." 

"Along with the rest of them." 

"So what do you want to do now?" 

Vila looks up at her, then at the rat in a box she is carrying. They at least have Orac, That's got to be something, doesn't it? 

"Find a starship. Steal a starship. Find somewhere to go and someone to go to." He hauls himself to his feet again. "I don't want to be a rebel any more, Soolin." 

"You never really did, did you?" 

"Not really. I just got caught up in it. Me, I'm really just a thief and a lock-breaker, I always, was, always will be." He's silent for a minute. "Maybe I need to go back to making a simple, honestly dishonest living, maybe I should never have stopped." 

"Maybe you can teach me," she says, her voice tired and drained but trying for lightness. "We can teach each other." 

"That's be... nice." And the thought is just that. Nice. The first nice thought he's had for as long as he can remember. 

"Do you wish you'd never met them?" 

"Maybe I do... or don't." He stops, not sure how to explain. "I liked Blake, you know. Always did. Always wished he could have done what he set out to. 

"But maybe... I'm glad it's over and done with. For them and for us." He straightens his shoulders, a part of him realising it for the first time he's done so in... years. 

There is a bright side, however grimed and faded. They _are_ alive. 

"Let's leave it, over and done with, here." 

The flyer swoops and circles once, and leaves the small, raw crater behind, taking the last of Blake's rebellion with it. 

**\- the end -**


End file.
